Absolute sense, backed by the reality that nature doesn't negotiate

Fossil fuels are nothing
than "ancient sunlight".

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day makes absolute sense in terms of adapting to climate change, but is laden with unresolved difficulties when applied to what exists.

How, for example, does a hospital care for patients over 24 hours? What does the self-employed person do whose financial fidelity depends on them working 60 hours a week? What does a farmer do? What does a professional endurance sportsperson do when their chosen sport demands training sessions of six-hours? How do traditional industrial businesses operate? What happens to the fly in–fly out people who work 12 hour days within the resource industry? What does a truck driver do?

All those things, of course, can only be resolved through negotiation between humans, all of which must be tempered by the irrefutable certainty that nature simply doesn’t negotiate.

Just 200 years of exploiting the world’s ancient sunlight (that is all our fossil fuels are) has seen humans change the atmosphere to such an extent that no matter how we behave in the short term, the world’s climate has changed.

The core idea of the Four-Hour Work Day is to bring a decided economic equity to the world and within that slow the damage we are causing to our atmosphere by making everyone, especially most in the world’s developed nations, poorer and so less able to consume and subsequently reduce our need for that “ancient sunlight”.

Should businesses, whatever they are, be able to see profitably in working past the four-hours, then they would need to hire another group of workers as the Four-Hour Work Day is just that, no overtime and no double shifts.

To understand the Four-Hour Work Day it is essential we escape from present mindsets; we abandon the growth imperative; we learn to put people before profit; we need to grasp the idea that true human happiness and contentment is not to be found in gathering fanciful baubles around us, but in connecting with those around us, our neighbours and others who live in our street, things that are greatly enriched when we work, in a traditional sense, fewer hours.